Back to the Landfill: A Look at Bon Appetite’s Food Waste Practices
Reported By: Sophia Lumsdaine
Photographed By: Allison Martinet
On their website, Bon Appetit discusses their concern about the environmental, economic, and moral tragedy of wasted food across the nation, and cites a variety of strategies they employ to reduce their production of waste.
Despite Bon Appetit's sustainability goals, all food that cannot be utilized in Canyon Commons–both kitchen scraps and food from students’ plates–is being thrown in the landfill.
Though this is a glaring inconsistency in the sustainable mindset Bon Appetit boasts, efforts are still being made to reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place. When possible, excess food is reused in other dishes. If this is not workable, it is then given to the Bruin Community Pantry; however, the Pantry cannot take items that don’t keep or reheat well.
Ken Clemens, general manager at George Fox University (GFU) Bon Appetit, estimated that of the approximately 750 lbs of food cooked daily at the Bon, 1-2% is being wasted in the kitchen; this amounts to between 53 lbs and 105 lbs per week. Over four weeks, this accumulates to between 210 and 420 lbs.
Those figures do not include food scraped off of students’ plates, which is harder to track but likely contributes to at least as much food waste as kitchen leftovers.
This disappoints Clemens: “I don’t want to see leftovers. That’s the goal [...] no leftovers,” he stated.
On a small scale, the Bruin Pantry sends its own leftovers to a local pig farmer, who feeds it to his livestock. Since there are many farms in the nearby area, one might think that this would be a viable option for the cafeteria as well.
However, a lot of non-edible items, including sharp metal silverware, end up mixed in with the food. In the first three weeks of school, 2,000 forks went missing, many of them thrown away with food waste. If given to livestock this could injure or kill the animals.
Another logical option–composting leftover food–also presents challenges. Bon Apeptit is a national franchise which serves over 1,000 venues. Among these locations are many regional universities, as well as enterprises like the Gates Foundation and the Adidas corporation. In a metro area such as Portland or Seattle, industrial composting is much more accessible, allowing food to be easily disposed of sustainably. According to Clemens, sending food to a municipal composting facility in the Portland metro area is not logistically feasible, and no system is in place locally.
However, Clemens sees potential for a more developed composting infrastructure in the Newberg area. “To me it’s the right community for it. There's so much farming going on out here, but it hasn't happened yet,” he stated.
In the meantime, Clemens is looking into a compost partnership with a small-scale farm. “Ideally I’d like to see a small 2-3 acre farm that we could support. I think we could do that without producing much leftovers. It doesn’t take much to make good compost,” he said.
While Bon Appetit’s food practices are certainly important when considering food waste and sustainability, responsibility also lies with students themselves. How much individuals eat off their plate is out of Bon Appetit’s control.
Understanding how much food students want is a learning process, Clemens said. “I do notice the trend that the food that I do see getting thrown away by the students at the end of the year is usually about half of what it was at the beginning of the year, because they’re learning.”
The effort to reduce and dispose of waste in a more sustainable way is an ongoing mission that will take time. Clemens hopes to have an initial partnership with a local farm in the works by December 2023 and a program called “Waste Not” to measure waste with greater accuracy by next school year.